Orton's Arm

In other words, you're going to continue to throw accusations around, and you're going to continue to refuse to back them up. The fact that you engage in credibility-free accusations is something you've been doing for quite some time.

It's this kind of spam that JSP doesn't want to see in this threads. And I can't blame him.

That's how it's done with coal. Dealing with something different from coal requires a different way of thinking. One which you apparently don't understand.

Thanks for expressing yourself so clearly.

You're utterly wrong. Let's say your goal is to burn leaves and other yard waste for electricity. Maybe hauling those leaves from Ohio to California would consume more energy than the leaves themselves would give back. But if you only have to haul them a short distance--20 miles say--you're using a lot less energy. You still have the challenge of building a plant that's a) relatively small, and b) reasonably efficient. But at least that's a possible task, whereas it may be impossible to get back the energy you'd spend moving those leaves or dead shrubs or whatever from place to place.

1. The electric cars were expensive to produce. Those who made the movie felt costs could come down as a result of economies of scale. Instead, the project was abandoned. The movie was made in part by the former GM employees who were responsible for the electric car project. It also included testimonials from electric car customers; some of whom were famous celebrities. GM has issued a public explanation for why it abandoned its electric car project. This isn't some old wives' tale. The electric car was killed for the following reasons (among others) California had passed a law requiring a certain percentage of all vehicles to be zero emissions by a specific date. GM wanted to derail that law, believing it wouldn't be able to meet its requirements. Without functional zero emissions vehicles, it's a lot easier to say the law's requirements are impossible to meet. The electric car was too expensive to produce. Some law would have required GM to stock replacement parts for electric cars in all GM dealerships. It wanted to avoid this burden. GM had elected to pursue a more SUV-intensive strategy with the acquisition of Hummer. It no longer felt it needed the electric car. 3. I wasn't trying to reinvent the term "solar," merely making the observation that most energy ultimately comes from the sun. Again, if you see me using the term "solar," it will be in the traditionally accepted meaning of the term. 4. My point was that a lot of plant waste is simply left to rot. If we burned it in power plants, we could turn that potential energy into electricity. What percentage of our power needs could be met through that mechanism? I don't know, but it's well worth doing. I'm not advocating chopping down Yellowstone for this purpose; but I do have my eye on people's yard waste, on corn stalks, on forests which naturally burn down anyway, etc. If something's burning, it may as well be producing electricity.

Blame the spammers, not me.

Here's a novel idea for you: think before you post. Or would that be asking too much? The lower the quantity of energy (either on a per-pound or per cubic-foot basis), the more transportation costs will run you per unit of energy produced. The optimal transportation distance therefore declines.

This is beyond insane. First, you accuse me of not knowing what psychometrics was, and asked for a definition. I provided a definition, which you ridiculed. Now you're complaining because I didn't back my definition up? Listen, buster. If you want to ridicule my definition of psychometrics, it's time for you to start backing stuff up. You say my earlier post was a bunch of nonsense. Fine. Which specific claims were nonsense? What do you feel is the correct definition for psychometrics, and can you back that definition up? It's time for you to put your money where your very loud mouth is, and start backing up the accusations you so freely throw around. I'm waiting. . . .

More blather.

You've demonstrated precisely zero knowledge of the word "psychometrics." In fact, your demonstrated knowledge has been less than zero, because you've accused me of ignorance about the word in response to a factually correct post.

I've taken the liberty of numbering your points, to make it easier to respond. I hope you mind. 1. According to the American Psychological Association, the heritability of I.Q. rises to 0.75 by late adolescence. Other sources indicate that by adulthood, the heritability is 0.8. For you to pretend that 0.6 is the only reasonable estimate for heritability (because some textbook said so) shows an ignorance of the many studies which point to a higher number as people reach adulthood. 2. Intelligence tests are useful, if imperfect, measurements of intelligence. High scores on intelligence tests correlate with a number of biological factors, as well as with specific life outcomes. Those who claim that intelligence tests are useless are either ignorant of the field of intelligence measurement, or else have an ideological ax to grind. 3. Shared environmental factors (same parents, same school, same meals, etc.) do not explain a significant percentage of adult variations in intelligence. 80% of intellectual variation is explained by genetics, with the remaining 20% of that variation being due to unique environmental factors (such as head injuries) and to measurement error. Yes, all this is at the group level, but there'd have to be something pretty dramatic going on for someone's environment to play a substantially larger-than-normal role in determining his or her intelligence. 4. If you ask questions which I've already covered, you shouldn't necessarily expect an answer. 5. Studies show that by adulthood, shared environmental factors (c^2) have little or no ability to explain differences in intelligence. If those studies displease you, conduct your own study on the subject. 6. Given that I've quoted from a number of sources, I don't see why you pretend that Wikipedia is my "only" source. 7. You say that any idea that I think of must be false, and then you wonder why I won't answer your many stupid questions. Why would I answer your questions when a) the questions betray a fundamental inability to understand my posts, and b) I know you wouldn't listen to, or understand, the answers anyway?

Ah yes, blame me for the fact that Bungee Jumper, his wife, and his puppy will disagree, on principle, with everything I write.

You've consistently demonstrated that you know absolutely nothing about what mainstream science has to say about the study of intelligence; beyond the fact that the alleles associated with intelligence have yet to be identified. You may think your knowledge of that particular datum makes you qualified to argue to your heart's content about this material. It doesn't. What you think are "falsehoods" are well-established facts in mainstream science. And just maybe you should learn what mainstream science has to say about intelligence before embarrassing yourself any further.

Are you honestly this incapable of understanding a single word of my posts?

Thank you for responding to subjects you know absolutely nothing at all about.

Yes, I know what energy density is. Obviously, the energy density of wood or leaves or such is lower than that of coal. So these power plants would have to be smaller and more dispersed than today's coal plants. If cars and trucks are electric, the transportation of this fuel would create no carbon footprint beyond the needed electricity. And if electricity's generated without fossil fuels, there's no carbon footprint for the entire system. Except for installing it in the first place. But given the nature of our present infrastructure, installing anything in the first place will create some kind of carbon footprint. You also mention the carbon footprint involved in farming. But that's with us already. I simply want to burn existing sources of plant waste, and use the ash as fertilizer. (Ash makes excellent fertilizer by the way.)

It's cute to see a wife be this loyal to her husband DC Tom.

I didn't specifically advocate the use of biofuels, except on a small scale. Imagine this scenario: all cars are electric, and all electricity is produced with the plant/grow/burn method I described earlier. If you just stuck to burning corn oil, the transition to biofuels probably wouldn't work. But if you burned everything--stalks, yard waste, wood that would normally be consumed in forest fires, everything--then maybe you'd have enough biomass to meet our energy needs. I don't know if anyone's done a study on this, but let's say you could only meet 40% of relevant energy needs in this way. The nice thing about this particular 40% is (a) that it's carbon-neutral, and (b) that you get to choose the timing of the energy. You could save the fuel for calm, windless nights when your solar cells and wind farms weren't producing anything.

Your concern was answered in my earlier post. You just didn't understand it.

You were obviously too stupid to understand my earlier post, so I won't waste time trying to explain it to you. Of the people you've mentioned, syhuang and I see eye-to-eye a lot better today than we once did. Unlike you, he readily understood the test/retest effect (a.k.a. regression toward the mean). While dave b and I have sometimes disagreed with things, I respect his intelligence, and hope he feels the same way about me. And a lot of what we disagreed on may have been communication errors versus fundamental disagreements. Coli is a pompous, arrogant pinko whose opinion about anything has no interest for me. GG manages to represent a unique combination of arrogance, complacency, and intellectual shallowness all his own. His sole contribution to these discussion boards was to ask--repeatedly--how one would go about selecting contestants for "America's Stupidest Woman." The joke wasn't funny the first ten times he said it.

Whereas you are not credible enough for this discussion.

What did I ever do to be thus plagued by DC Tom/Bungee Jumper, his wife Ramius, and their puppy jzmack?

1. The movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" described an electric car GM had been manufacturing. The battery for that car had a longer-than-usual endurance. They're no longer making that car, and the company that owns the patents to the battery has since been purchased by an oil company. 3. My point in classifying most energy forms as "solar" was to underscore the fact that most energy sources involve some mechanism for converting sunlight into something we can use. Whether it's a photovoltaic cell, or photosynthesis, or some other process, we're still using the sun's energy. I agree that this (broader) definition of "solar" can be confusing if used in a shorthand way, which is why I normally only apply the word "solar" to electricity harvested directly from sunlight. 4. If you're taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air, you're doing something that makes the CO2 situation worse. That's what we're doing whenever we burn coal, oil, or even natural gas. Fossil fuels are not CO2 neutral: they make the carbon situation worse. In contrast, say you plant something, wait for it to grow, and then burn it. The plant took carbon out of the air when it grew, and put that carbon right back into the air when it was burned. The acres of land you're using for this aren't helping the carbon situation any, but neither are they harming it. If we switched from fossil fuels to plant/grow/burn, the amount of carbon in the earth's atmosphere would begin to slowly decline. This is because we'd no longer be taking carbon out of the ground, anywhere. But there would be the occasional forest where old trees or other plant matter would gradually get buried, and thereby put new carbon into the ground.

Look at it this way. The Bills would need maybe a 2nd round pick to replace McGahee's production as a pure runner. Over the course of his career, this hypothetical second round pick could become a more complete back than McGahee was. So you can look at this as trading away our second round pick (if used on a RB) in exchange for two thirds. And as a result of this trade, the Bills will have gotten younger and potentially better at RB, with a more favorable contract situation to boot. I haven't agreed with everything Marv's done, but I do like this trade.